What is the current status of Multizoning audio?

[samgreco]

Interesting...... Only touble with scsi is cost for space.

That's why my media server is all IDE. I buy drives on sale at Fry's and such. Cheap !

The master strem isinteresting, but then you use up CPU cycles compressing it. But that still may not be to bad.

As for volume control, there's no reason that I couldn't use Grder or even XLobby and sendmessage. Well, probably no reason.

[rbziggy]

The reason that the zones fall out of sync in XLobby usually is that you are actually sending multiple streams of the same file out simultaneously. So if you have 3 zones, Winamp opens 3 copies of the same MP3 file and streams them. 3 times the throughput one the drives and the CPU.

An interesting insight. I guess there is no way of persuading one instance of winamp to output to multiple sound-cards?

[rhinoman]

I guess there is no way of persuading one instance of winamp to output to multiple sound-cards?

Thats basically what shoutcast does, shoutcast creates a music stream at an ip adress on your network. Winamp or foobar then just points at the url of the stream. As I've said I use this to put a uhf radio deck on my system and at 128k mo3 quality the sync is perfect.

Thinking out loud......

What I'm not sure about is how we could control what music is then played through xlobby.

It could work with 2 xlobbys running on different machines.

Machine 1, shoutcast and winamp for the choosing of music.
Machine 2, for the zones, all pointing to the shoutacst stream giving independent volume control.

It would only get a bit fussy if you constantly want to change volumes and change the playing music. That would mean having 2 ppc's, one pointing to each xlobby. t would work well if for a party a playlist was created for a shoutcast server to play that did not need to change. kinda misses the fun of a giant jukebox though.

[rbziggy]

I may have found something interesting on winamp site after a bit of hunting around.

There is a winamp plugin called Output Stacker that allows one winamp instance to output to multiple output devices.

I've just created another winamp copy "all zones" and created another zone with this in XL.

I think you also need to duplicate out_ds in winamp dir (out_ds, out_ds2 etc). The stacker plugin then allows you to select each of these outputs.

I've done all this and it looks fine but can't test it as its after midnight and I'll wake the whole house if I fire up 'all zones'

I'll check tomorrow am!

If this works (says hopefully), then just adding extra winamp zones suitably configured does the trick and all controllable simply via XL.

Here's hoping...

[rhinoman]

Sounds good, let me know how your testing goes.

[Chazotta]

Well, getting back to the original question, I ditched the idea of xlobby providing synched audio to the zones in my house, at least in the context of streaming the audio from my RAID 5 server accross gig LAN to each of the PC's in each zone. My experience was that it would be in synch for a while and then go out of synch, somethimes several milliseconds and sometimes by a whole track. USing Winamp.

Quite frankly, i don't think xlobby is at that place yet to achieve it and unless somebody decides to take on the development of xlobby, its probably never going to happen. sulk.

Unless I can be convinced otherwise, I am soon to have the main XL server independent to the other xlobby servers in each room and have the main XL server feed each zone PC a balanced line. This would then enable the main XL server to simply send the audio via balanced into the soundcard of the PC in each zone. The only draw back from this approach is that the other instances of XL in the zones may be playing something and you would need to gain control of that, else you could have two things playing at once in a zone. Is it possible for the zone PC running XL to connect to the main XL server so that a command can be setup from the main XL server to tell all other instances of XL in the other zones to stop playing ? whilst at the same time, have the zone instances of XL still independent to the main XL server (ie: so that a person in a zone can play stuff without affecting other zones) ?

[samgreco]

First - rbziggy - I am very interested in this idea. The output stacker is EXACTLY what I am looking for and could make it way easier to implement. Please do keep us posted.

Second - Chazotta - I am a bit confused. What you are suggesting is what I and rhinoman and hjackson and others are/have/will be doing. We are taking soundcards with multiple outputs and feeding multi-channel ampliliers with that signal. I think you may be talking about XNet, which is an entirely different animal.

I have NEVER been able to get multiple PCs to sync using XNet, but that has hardly been developed.

The way I am talking about is very doable.

[Marbles_00]

rbziggy, if that works, then this could put Xlobby out front of all the other frontend software...wait a sec, what am I saying, Xlobby is already the best out there, but this could just solidify the position.

Please, let us know how your test go. There are a bunch of eager people waiting for the results.

[Chazotta]

Yes I was talking XNET.

Sounds like it is the same, except that I will be outputting the sound into the soundcard of the zone PC, rather than into a Preamp or mulitchannel amp etc. I would like to use the zone PC as the preamp and feed the separate amplifier for that zone direct from the PC. (In other words, I have separate amplifiers for each zone and the amplifiers are located in each zone, rather than one amp or several amps in one location).

In your situation, does the zone PC allow a user to run xlobby locally on that PC so that a user in that zone can play media off the server independently and at the same time while the main XL server is doing something completely different in the main (or another) zone?

PS it would be good if you guys could post a very comprehensive summary (possibly with a diagram) of your mulitzone setup, how you are running xlobby on each PC, what skin you are using etc... to achieve mulit zone audio.

[samgreco]

The XNet concept is much more difficult to do than a single PC with multiple output soundcard. There is just no way to insure sync. However, doing it your way, with the line level audio feeding an input into the soundcard would work. It's just more complex.

Example: If you are watching a movie in one room and someone else in the house feeds an all zone signal into your room, it could get ugly So you'll have to figure out how to turn off any external inputs whenever someone is playing something locally

My plan is to have the clients (not really zone pcs). control the zone they are in using XLobby's thin client.

I don't have it setup yet, so I can't provide all of the info you'd like. But I will as I go along.

[Chazotta]

I would be intersted to know how you will achieve it. sounds good.

Won't you have the same problem you mentioned even if you feed the input into an amp/preamp (rather than into the one PC) ? Under your scenario, how does the user in a given zone kill any audio that is being fed accross all zones ? If it is done by thin client, isn't there going to be problems with what one user does within a given zone affecting other zones ?

[rhinoman]

The thin client can control the independent winamp/foobar volume control for any given zone.

[Marbles_00]

I would assume that the only problem if rbziggy idea works is that a user will loose the ability to control individual zone volume when running in full sync. Then again, would you want to adjust the volume for individual zones if partying it up with friends?

This idea could be the solution to run a couple of zones and keep others independent. You just have to set up the different instances of Winamp. The only drawback there is if you have alot of zones, you will have a tremendous amount of combinations to set up for.

[rbziggy]

First - rbziggy - I am very interested in this idea. The output stacker is EXACTLY what I am looking for and could make it way easier to implement. Please do keep us posted.

Well, what can I say, it looks like it works.

I have it up and running on two of three zones (third is out of commission at the moment - will put it back this weekend). But if it runs on two should have no prob on more as it doesn't strain the processor or i/o.

Observations:

- Sync - oh yes, can't see how it could get out of sync in practice either.
- Yes it 'locks' the zones together through one winamp so you cant change volume independently but if you balance them as you want on the soundcard or poweramp I don't see this as a problem (again for me this is mainly a party mode device).
- Had a bit of a funny setting up the zones on the stacker. Couple of times they seemed to all fall back to one zone's channel. Reset the config in winamp a couple of times and seems to be fine now.
- May need to be a bit careful on programming XL. It's possible to play (say) zone 1 and all-zones simultaneously. On-card mixing?!?

For me, providing it's robust, this looks like the solution for my needs. I'm going to continue to run and will update.

Does anyone want more detailed set up instructions or will my earlier post suffice?

I found output stacker plugin here:

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php ... ost1593266

There are various posts on the winamp forums. Some instructions here:

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php ... ut+stacker

It would be great if others could try this out and see how things go.

Regards

Richard

[samgreco]

Richard,

Great news. Seems that you could setup XLobby to shut down any individual zones whenever you go to "all zones" with events.

I just installed my new Delta 1010LT last night. So I will try to get some testing in this weekend.